Google Rolls out Virtual Braille Keyboard for Android

Google'southward accessibility features on Android just got a lot better with the addition of an in-built virtual Braille keyboard. The company says information technology collaborated with braille developers to offering a unified typing experience across apps to help people with visual impairments.

"Today, braille displays make typing accessible on near phones and computers through a physical braille keyboard. Just it tin can be time-consuming to connect an external device each time you want to type something quickly on your telephone.", wrote Google on its blog mail.

Google says the typing experience on its virtual Braille keyboard will almost be the aforementioned as the physical Braille keyboard. Hence, there won't be a meaning learning bend for people who're used to typing Braille.

The keyboard uses a standard 6-fundamental layout. Each key in the layout represents one of the six braille dots. These dots are used to form letters or symbols. The keyboard can be toggled on or off just like you ordinarily switch keyboards after yous enable information technology.

To enable the braille keyboard, get to your phone's Settings ->Accessibility ->TalkBack-> Settings. Detailed instructions to setup and configure the TalkBack Braille keyboard are present here.

The keyboard supports various handy gestures. To be specific, swiping left deletes a letter, a 2-finger swipe to the left deletes a discussion. You can add a space by swiping right while 2-finger swipe right switches to a new line and two-finger swipe up submits the current text input.

TalkBack Braille keyboard supports Braille grade 1 & grade 2 and is now bachelor on Android phones with version 5.0 Lollipop or later. The language back up is initially limited to English but we could expect Google to add support for more languages in the future.

Only like TalkBack Braille keyboard and Audio Amplifier, nosotros hope Google also pushes its much-needed Alive Caption accessibility feature to all compatible phones rather than touting information technology as an exclusive flagship feature.